President Obama pointed out last week that while the "typical
president" has to handle two or three big problems at once, he has had
to juggle "seven or eight." Still, the new administration is managing
to generate an impressive amount of energy and activism across that
broad field. In foreign affairs, that raises a compelling question: Do
the levers of American influence still work?

The question can be asked about the Middle East, Iran and North Korea,
where the administration's special envoys and initiatives so far are
showing few results. But it is coming to a head in Pakistan, where the
Obama team has focused much of its attention and diplomacy the past
two weeks.

This first big test has been something of a slow-burner, often
neglected by media distracted by pirates and swine flu. Nevertheless,
the accelerating power of Islamic extremists in a nuclear-armed state
is as big and as scary a threat as any president has faced since the
end of the Cold War -- and the administration has responded with an
aggressive array of military, political, diplomatic and economic
initiatives, in Pakistan, Washington and elsewhere.

The trouble is, it all may not work -- as senior administration
officials frankly acknowledge. By year's end, Pakistan could morph
into a catastrophe that overshadows those six or seven other big
problems. That won't happen because the White House ignored it, but it
may be the case that proves that U.S. global influence has receded to
a dangerous degree.

The administration began by treating Pakistan as an adjunct to its
strategy for Afghanistan, because Pakistan's western tribal
territories serve as bases for the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda. Yet in
the past month Pakistan suddenly has seemed to tip toward collapse as
the Taliban rapidly expanded toward Islamabad while the country's army
and weak civilian government dithered.

This is the sort of trouble U.S. administrations have often ignored
until it was too late -- as in neighboring Iran before its Islamic
revolution. So it's been notable how quickly how many senior Obama
administration officials have concentrated on Pakistan. Adm. Mike
Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has almost camped out in
Rawalpindi, the headquarters of Pakistani army commander Ashfaq
Kiyani, visiting twice in the past month alone. President Asif Ali
Zardari has been invited to Washington this week for a trilateral
summit with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The administration organized a pledging conference in Tokyo three
weeks ago that raised $5.5 billion in new civilian aid for the
government. It is meanwhile talking to Congress about quickly
approving $400 million in training money for Pakistani security forces
fighting the Taliban, in addition to the billions in military and
economic aid in future budgets. The National Security Council met last
week to hear a new report by the U.S. intelligence community, which
concluded that an Islamic revolution in Pakistan was not likely "in
the near future." An intensive review has also begun of how Pakistan's
nuclear weapons are secured and what might happen to them in an
emergency.

Much of the focus flows from the administration's special envoy system
at the State Department, which has served to bypass a sometimes
sluggish bureaucracy. Richard Holbrooke, the czar for Afghanistan and
Pakistan and a diplomat of legendary aggressiveness, has been
showering Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the White House with
memos on Pakistan, shuttling back and forth to the region, and bulking
up his staff with outside experts.

All this activity has produced some tentative results. Under heavy
American pressure, Zardari backed down from a potentially disastrous
street confrontation with rival Nawaz Sharif; the administration is
now trying to push Pakistan's two biggest civilian parties into an
alliance. Days after Mullen's last visit, the Pakistani army finally
launched an offensive last week against Taliban forces that had
infiltrated the Buner district, some 60 miles from the capital.

The administration is discovering, however, that its power to
influence events in Pakistan is quite limited. Other than
remote-controlled missile strikes, the United States has no direct
means of stopping Islamic extremists from taking over the country.
Despite its new offensive, Pakistan's army still resists U.S. urgings
that it shift some of the 250,000 troops it has deployed along the
border with India to the western territories where the Taliban is
entrenched. Much of the civilian elite remains focused on intramural
political squabbles and -- like Iran's secular middle class in the
1970s -- discounts the fundamentalist menace.

"We have a list of things we can do, but at the end of the day they
are inputs," one senior official said. "None of them can determine the
internal dynamics of the country."

In other words, energy and focus won't necessarily spare Obama from a
foreign policy disaster. "It's not good when your national security
interests are dependent on a country over which you have almost no
influence," said that senior official. Yet those are the cards this
atypical president has drawn.

--
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.
- Jorge Louis Borges